TaskBullet

Chris Kilbourn interview

Full interview with Chris Kilbourn

To listen click here:

Wesley:Hey everyone Wesley here with Taskbullet.com. Our clients are always asking us for help with their Social Media Marketing. We do have experience and knowledge in this subject but we decided. We thought it would be better to bring in an expert of the subject and hear what he has to say. So I’m here with Chris Kilbourn to talk about Social Media Marketing. Chris is a Growth and Marketing expert. He has been in the industry for nine years and has contributed to many more publications like entrepreneur, hub spot, crazy egg, and many more. You can see a more complete list and the services that Chris offers in his website chriskilbourn.com. Chris thanks for taking the time out of your schedule to do this interview.

Chris: hey Wes, thanks. It’s great to be here.

Wesley: yeah, I’m excited. So I know that I just said that you’ve been in the industry for nine years but how long have you been doing Social Media Marketing specifically?

Chris: yeah, so it’s been about probably around nine years. I started off with doing Social Media Marketing on Myspace back when 2007 I believe. So yeah, it’s been a while, we’ve always something new going on so it’s really been pretty fun.

Wesley: it’s funny how you say the word Myspace. I don’t know why it is its funny for me to hear that word. Because it’s been ancient history to be even – you know I guess it’s the start of Facebook.

Chris:yeah and it’s really odd that it actually happens too because Facebook actually have lots of features and generally was just lot more interesting than Myspace. Because of the way that they launched, they were able to just gather more attention from people. And it’s also right when my space started to. And they couldn’t regulate the advertisements and spams that was happening in our site very well. And I think that also contributed to the jump. So

Wesley:OK, alright. Let’s get in to this, so when someone comes to you and asks for how to put their social media marketing, what is the first thing that you tell them?

Chris:I always start by asking three really important questions. The most important of which is what are your actual goals? A lot of peoplewhether it’s their own business or whether they’ll be real estate agents, or insurance agents, or doctors or like having a mall in top shops they are frequently told you get social media marketing and its great and you should have it. And if you don’t, we all know the reason why it’s not around. And I think that kind of approach doesn’t really work very well because people are starting with actual tactic without actually knowing what they’re doing. And so it’s kind of like putting a car before the horse right? And I think that when you kind of looking like goals you can typically breaks them down with the most common which [unclear 03.40] as either to garner awareness of our company. Which can also be a different strategy than the goal or increasing our mind sales right now. So your timeline or your tactics will be greatly affect the timeline of results you’re giving. And especially in social media marketing you need to know exactly what you’re doing before you actually get into it. So the second item that I like to focus on is asking what kind of business do you actually run? So social media is a very broad topic of marketing and a lot of people – like a lot of marketing company as well kind of bucket a lot of companies into specific strategies. And it’s almost like trying to fit a square bag into circular whole. You know it doesn’t fit with every single types of business. And so like someone has that run a doctor’s office it totally [unclear 04.48] to use different strategy specifically in social media then like company that creates a consumer products. And stalls in the local stores or online. And the third important questions I have is what resources can you actually allocate to the marketing campaign? So some people have more time, then others have money is important resource obviously. And the actual brain power of your actual team. So if you have someone with has lot of marketing experience in your team, their time can be much more effective than someone has an intern, I mean that doesn’t know anything. And I actually a lot of companies make that kind of mistake where’s they’re like OK, we want to bring on someone to do the marketing. We’ll just grab an intern and go at it. In almost every case that I’ve seen with that kind of situation, it’s just turn out to terrible campaign. It doesn’t work, business owners gets frustrated fires the intern. And their expectations are not set properly because they don’t understand like how marketing campaign is going to work on social media – specifically in their business.

Wesley:OK, so you hate interns.

Chris:I was before yes. And not for marketing.

Wesley:I totally understand what you’re saying, so I agree.

Chris:Frequently it’s not the actual intern’s fault, it’s the business owner’s fault for not knowing what they’re doing with the interns. Because internships were supposed to be an experience that the junior level marketer can actually require from the business rather than actually having to come up with all the ideas around themselves and test the reason themselves and stuff like that. So there’s the big disconnect between what inters supposed to be doing.

Wesley:the intern idea is actually lot like a virtual assistant. They come in and you know the intern does know the tools and they do have experience. They know what to do it’s like a virtual assistant but without answering the first 2 or 3 questions that you’ve asked what the goals are, what kind of business you’re doing and what’s happening here? Without knowing that the VA’s have a hard time too. So I think you could almost replace the intern with VA like why it didn’t work? That’s why it didn’t work?

Chris:yeah exactly, and I actually think that VA’s are much better than interns in that case still because although they still need guidance, they typically have experience with helping companies before where are the interns have no experience at all. And mostly education that they learn, if you’re picking up an intern from a local university. I mean I guarantee, even if they have a degree on marketing they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s too late. Online marketing changes every six months traumatically. And what they learn in school is typically like foundation marketing if you are working for fortune five hundred company. And you came in as entry level marketer is very corporate kind of experience that you get. Or the education that you actually get from the school because as they take marketing classes it’s not typically what they focus on. But the teachers don’t know what happening in the real world. They’re not able to actually teach it quickly enough to their students. So that’s also the benefit of working with the virtual assistant.

Wesley:OK, so let’s say you get those for 3 questions answered and you’re about to get into it but what are your favourite social media outlets to use?

Chris:I love social media outlets that are large and have a large user base. So I typically coorporate like the big three or five Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and mostly because the audience is so large there. There’s also a lot of opportunity there and also easy to reach them all like if you are a local real estate agent for Utah. You can find your audience on Facebook guaranteed. But if you are dealing with smaller social media companies that are up and coming typically you’re targeting different demographic, typically much younger. And its interesting how people hop from social media sites as they get older. There’s actually this, I saw this earlier. There’s a population curve of social media users, where the youngest social media users are the first adapters to social media sites. And they actually pick up steam then older and older people are joining. So there’s an opportunity there for targeting smaller social media sites that many people may not even heard of. I know Vine was starting to get big but now they actually just closed it down for example. So there’s a lot of risk also in there if you put your eggs in your basket. And you’re targeting social media that are smaller, it’s much more risky because they could shot down and you just lose your entire audience. So like a lot of people marketing on Twitch, now try to get the people on to YouTube which is you know a social media as well. Not just you know to put out videos – huge communities around YouTube is all based on videos. So choosing a social media site can – it highly depends on what kind of business you have as well. And then you’re looking at what actually to deal. Like one type of marketing is called Social listening typically when you have a piece of software that runs on a site like twitter and it listens for people using words that can define yourself. So you can add your business, you can add people talking about your competitors, you can have it track people using words stream that are related to your industry. Going back to that real estate agent situation. If I was a real estate agent and I was using Social Listening I would have my tool notify me. When people are talking about moving to Utah or if I know that they live in Sandy and they’re talking about moving. Or like they’re looking to find a new home, Social Listening will notify whoever is managing the account. And who can immediately help the person and say “Hey I can help you find that account” or “I heard this guy is really good” when you are referring to an agent or something like that. So Social Listening can really be powerful. A lot of marketers use social listening for a large brands because they want to hear when people are complaining about something so the brand can actually hop in and try to fix the problem before you become the support care of their customer service. So typically small businesses don’t need to do that very much because people don’t talk about small business in social media a lot versus large corporation. But it’s great finding topics and be able to hop like people conversing on social media site before you hop in. so Facebook pages, I’ve grown to really dislike, because Facebook has constrained the reach of your audience. When you actually make a Facebook post originally (when was it) like eight years ago? When Facebook picked up steam, if the company – or when they actually created company pages. If the company created a post it would guarantee you to show up on in the users Facebook news feed. Slowly over time they started eliminating more and more businesses’ post that will show up in Facebook users feed and now it’s really rare. So for example I’m not going to give more detail about the flavour but I’ve managed an accounts to have an over a million Facebook likes. And we would post on the page and we it will actually say how people saw the post in the news feed. And Facebook filtered out about 99.99% of the people that liked our page – that would see our actual post, so we would make a post you know like a million likes on the Facebook group throughout our Facebook page and it would receive fifty likes. You know, so incredibly low number of people are actually seeing business post on Facebook. But there are new features of Facebook ads that actually starts. They want to get people to use them very frequently and as such they rewards company to hop in early on those features. So Facebook groups are relatively new, you can just search in Facebook like industry terms. Like real estate in Utah, or the Facebook group all over the place for almost any types of industry. The key with the Facebook groups that I’ve been finding generate results specifically is identifying which Facebook groups are the most active. So you join the group, looks to the post and see how many bunch of likes on each of the post. If it doesn’t you can hop out of the group, if you make a normal you probably won’t see it. But there are certain other groups where I joined. There were smaller in each group and I make a post just last week. And it go over 500 likes, almost have in two days. So finding the right group on Facebook can actually using data or network and promote your business in a way that’s interact can work very well. And then there’s the image based sites such as Instagram and Pinterest if you have a consumer product. Like if you are – one of my clients was a modest swimwear manufacturer

Wesley:modest swimwear?

Chris:yeah you know, we’re in Utah and so that will take a lot. So they actually have a couple sources well but you know if I was run down right now for their social media I definitely get them on Pinterest, I definitely get them on Instagram because the audience reach percentage is much higher on both of the those websites versus Facebook. And then YouTube is also good for that. If you could create a really good video then there’s a lot of opportunity there as well. But you know the company’s called Limericky there are. And I would definitely recommend them to do Instagram and Pinterest and potentially YouTube but probably less Facebook and less twitter. But they can really produce on the visual, they can get really creative with all that and those few image based social media sites can be really good.

Wesley:OK. So you mention, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest. And that is a great explanation of how to use one of them, but there’s also tools out there that people have heard of. I tell you one that we use here at Taskbullet but I’m sure you know all about the tools. I mean obviously you’re talking about Social Listening. What are your favourite tools to use when trying to develop a social media marketing campaign?

Chris:yeah, so outside of the native tools that’s actually the social media sites provided you such as in Facebook – if you want to run ads on Facebook there’s a tool they’ve created that’s called Business Manager or Ad Manager. And that changes all the time, almost every like few weeks. I check in on there and see have they all been added features or something. So their slowly getting better at that but there are few other tools that I prefer to use. Such as Hootsuite which allows you to schedule your post in advance. So you can or your business can top it all out or it made it easier for you to get over all perspective for what’s happening on all your social media sites whether on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram and stuff like that, so that helps a lot. And then Hootsuite also have a social listening features as well. Although there are other tools that do that extremely well such as Nuvi.com. And so they have a social listening tool that deal which were exactly what we’re talking about just a minute ago. Tracking people using type of words and phrases you can also set it up so it eliminates people talking about or like using the words you don’t want. Nuvi connected in sort of way so those are really great tools. Another one that helps you schedule your post on Instagram is called Schedugram. And I’ve been primarily using this cause it has some features that they created for it. And honestly I don’t know if it’s going against Instagram terms of service to be able to do some of this features that Schedugram uses. So I think that’s one of the reasons whyit has actual features, they kind of like walk around some barriers that Instagram could provide. And another cool part of Schedugram is I did mention earlier like so Hashtags (#) are extremely effective on Instagram, so I used to not really think that when I’ve been running my client’s campaign on Instagram and effectively I use # all the time. So I use Hashtags (#) and I didn’t really see that much list. Until last year when I was, I used the tool called Keyhole and there’s others tool out there as well that I use. Where if you do some research on the Hashtags (#) that are popular and so for those of you that don’t know. Hashtags (#) are like a number sign essentially – a number sign and then a particular word. So if you are selling a house in [unclear 21:15] as real estate agents like #beautifulhouses like a single one word. And that article rises your post so if other people online want to search for beautiful houses they can search #beautifulhouses something like that. And having used that # that most people used. You definitely need a tool to be able to come to find that usually. So few are very apparent like if I was some photos of dogs that are wearing my consumer product of like a specific leash or something as an example. I would #dog, #cutedog , #puppy like that. And you can actually add up to 30 hashtags when you post on Instagram.

Wesley:this is ad 30 versus 2

Chris:yes, that’s a good question so a lot of people think, “OK well that looks Spamming right?” if you posted a picture of dog and it’s like 30 hashtags that are showing up in the description of the image. So that looks spamming and that’s actually bad but the thing about Schedugram right now is they have a new feature that lets you post the #’s as a comment on Instagram. And so what happens if you like the post, you don’t use any #’s at all when you post it but Schedugram can make it automatically add that #’s into the first comment of the photo. So it access like – it will still do the #’s but it’s hidden. So people won’t probably see it and it kind of like getting complicated or technical. But if you were to use Schedugram they have video on how it actually see how that works and you don’t have any questions on how that works you know, everyone can just reach out to me or you can just google having #’s on Instagram that don’t show up, they do show up if someone clicks on to view all for comments of the photo. But if they don’t click on the view the comments, they don’t see all these #’s that you’ve added. So Keyhole ole help me find the #’s that are most popular that I don’t even know about. So if I were to search for you know – if I needed to find 30 #’s on how to do it like dogs or people searching for things around dogs. A tool like Keyhole will provide those #’s to me, it will say these are the 30 most #’s of dogs, and I just take that and then I just take that in every photo. And I did that this year and it has grown like my accounts immensely by knowing that the exact #’s I need to use that for every single photo and the same thing over and over again of post and image. And I make sure that the quality of the image is really good because obviously that’s the people want. And that will make the most, it will be the most effective for you so that’s Keyhole. There are other tools that let you run advertising for you through social media so you know. So you’ve seen on Facebook on the other side there are ads also like you’re seeing your news feed, there’s ads. If you want to build advertise to people there are tools like Adwhirl that help you these. And so Adwhirl specifically helps business by serving what they called retargeting ads. And so a lot of people have seen these ads where in you know if you go on Amazon you start looking for products and then you go back to you Facebook accounts. Looking around, clicking on stuff and you’ll see him right on the site that Amazon will be promoting to you the product that you’re just looking at on Amazon. So basically they know this, they know all the pages that you’ve been on their site. And it’s connected with Facebook and so it’s pretty genius because by advertising to you when you actually even left their site. It’s typically generates a really high return in terms of like return of investment for what you spent. Because the people are most likely to buy from you or just by your site but didn’t buy for some reason or the other and if you could just bring them back and buy. That’s much more effective than trying to invite others that haven’t been heard of your company. So Adwhirl’s really great. And then if you wanted to create imagery for your ads and then a post in your social media, if you don’t know how to use photoshop – a lot of people of don’t. And thankfully there are lots of tools out there now that a help the people that just don’t know how to design anything. They can create imagery for this, they can even let you create video. And so these tools are Canva, is one of themand widelinks to the description of these transcribed adobe spark is another one that helps you create imagery. And also these are free so you can try it whatever you like. There is not really catch on, I mean if it’s Canva just heard as you if you want to use stock photography that is a dollar per photo that you used if you want to. Otherwise you can use your own imagery so it’s really an awesome tool.

Wesley:OK cool. We’ve gone through quite a bit, there’s a lot of social media accounts that you have to worry about if you’re going to do marketing and then there’s a bunch of tools that you have to worry about so gosh, let’s talk technique. If someone can master all of that stuff we’ve talked about. Do you have secret techniques that worked for you than others that you try?

Chris:yeah, so I’d say that they just trick for the half. Like now utilizing these teachers that social media sites are starting to release because the rewarding marketers and business owners used them so that they can tried it out and kind of push it out of people. So I don’t think of Facebook groups, they worked really well right now and Facebook live which you may have seen. It actually only works if you have Facebook on your mobile device. It’s really hard to deviated you obviously because in Facebook live what would you do is record yourself live through your camera on the phone. And you see a lot of celebrities were people will comment on Facebook questions for the celebrities or person like a Marketer something like that for the influencer. And the influencer or response to those questions are live while holding their phone at home. And sometimes people get to set it up next to the computer so they don’t have to hold it out for a long time. But people anyone on Facebook that uses that create this Facebook live video feed they actually pushed up the news feed immediately for people that following that business or celebrities or influencer in that sense. So Facebook live is really awesome if you can do that like for example for a local company Limericky that we’re talking about, if they would wanting to show how they actually manufacture the products to people can see “oh this is legitimate company”. It did really great work, they build high quality materials. They can just bring the Facebook live video around there. Their warehouse and you kind of see the people and stuff like that so that’s kind of fun and all. Facebook will feed this as well, so people that aren’t watching it live will going to watch it later. But then if I were a real estate agent I would use it for showing people houses that I think are really cool for selling. Like if you have a patio in your house that you’re selling and you think it’s really cool you know you can use that. People can ask you live while you’re showing of the house and stuff like that. So there’s a lot of opportunities there. I’ve actually never seen a real estate agent use Facebook live. I actually never seen any professional service company use it even and they can. So you can even use it in your personal account too. So if you don’t have a huge following on Facebook account for your business. But you have a lot of friends they can create the supply video and your friends will get notify of it almost immediately when they jump on the Facebook. The third most effective technique that I have right now is definitely through Instagram. Adding a lot of Hashtags, making sure those #’s are tagging people are searching for and if you’re using tools like Keyhole so that will be the most important that I found that work.

Wesley:OK, so I like what you’re saying about Facebook live that makes a lot of sense. It almost like follow the new trends that the large companies are going with and then just do it. Like if they’re pushing live then go on live then do it. Figure something out to use that and then they’ll going to favour you and put you on the top in two years they have something different. So you’ll rewarded for being an early adapter.

Chris: exactly, and you’re always pumping yourself up. I mean Facebook live started to get attraction earlier this year but it has still the old version of it. So you can’t use normal computers yet you have to use your phone. So I’m thinking once they release it for desktop you know that will [unclear 31:51] and then Facebook also just release a Facebook market place so it’s like Craigslist for Facebook.

Wesley:yeah, I’ve seen that.

Chris:that’s starting to get attraction, people are liking it then Facebook is definitely favouring those kinds of notifications. Posting for products that selling on there. I’ll get notifications every time saying like 4 people posted products in Utahyardsale.com or Facebook group or whatever. And I think it’s interesting that can take that approach, and that’s mobile only for some reasons. So that’s Facebook is definitely focusing on mobile. And at first I was thinking that’s probably because most people are using mobile in general and that’s true. But Facebook is also considering that a lot of people outside of US the only computer that they do own is a smart phone. So like in Africa, many of those people don’t have desktops but they have a phone. A lot of smart phones, or in India are the same thing. Or China same thing. Although I don’t think Facebook are in china yet since they blocked it.

Wesley:I don’t know if they allow it.

Chris:Yeah unfortunately but those are huge-huge populations right? Like Africa or India are probably half of the entire world’s population I assume billions of people. So Facebook also take that into account.

Wesley:yeah and google keeps releasing statistics too where its everything is mobile. If your site isn’t mobile ready and mobile friendly then they will almost discount you. And if it is then they will move up you in the ranks. So like even if they were announcing like a couple of years ago or like a year ago. They were actually redoing their entire PBC system to focus on mobile first so I mean if they’re doing that, there’s probably a reason. [Unclear 34:01] you know are we mobile friendly?

Chris:oh yeah definitely. And if you don’t have a mobile friendly site then google actually penalize you in a search result so if they see that the site isn’t set up for mobile or to look great on mobile. You know you’ll never have this large chance of actually shorten up on the search results when someone searches for keywords related to your business. Yeah I’ll see that every day, my girlfriend doesn’t even use a computer like a desktop computer anymore. She always uses her phone for everything. And so like we’re talking about like I’ll mention something about Facebook and she says “I can even see because I’m using my phone”. It’s a totally different experience for people on there on mobile and it doesn’t suits me to consider it so.

Wesley:wow great! Lot of info this is fun to sort through this after. OK so you’ve been doing this for a while. You obviously have the knowledge, so let me hear some of your victories. What’s been the biggest victory with social media marketing that you had and why? What is the reason of your victory?

Chris:I’ve been using – so I run small businesses like a start-ups in addition to marketing and web design. Work that I do for people. And one of these is a real small niche. Like a collector’s items, and all of that particular topic. And with normal advertising in general, it’s difficult because if you’re like a big fish in a big pond it’s hard to get attention from people. And all the people will use some phrases like its not about the wit, the number of people in your audience. It’s all about the depth of the people on your audience. So when you create relationships with people you better have deeper relationship with smaller set of people that you’re marketing to rather than a really shallow relationship with a ton of people. So I’m actually starting to realize that the actual of that through Facebook groups of this really small niche that my business targets. So I’ll be able to post things in the Facebook group that – like I get responses. I’m getting an average responses like 200 likes and maybe like 30 comments from people talking of how excited they are about my products, they never heard of it before. I’ve never joined this group before and it’s getting a ton of attraction. And not just because people is all about depths, rather than wits. The Facebook group probably has a thousand people on it you know. The audience sizes doesn’t esteem that large or like a large industry but the depth is definitely there. And I feel confident like when you know when you releases our products in a few weeks we’re really going to get a stales from that because probably every person on the group can be find or maybe large majority. So that’s a huge victory that I have for myself and just a really good lesson in terms of when you deciding your audience. Like I was mentioning earlier about when I choose social media sites to have large audiences. High number of audiences I choose Facebook and stuff like that because this niches was to defend all those audiences and so typically that niche focuses on Facebook because it’s the social media site that we’re on. If there was for social media site for my niche outside the Facebook then I would definitely chose that but that doesn’t actually exist in my situation. So Facebook kind of make a go to you right now.

Wesley:OK. I’ve been kind of like when people asks me don’t stick with the main social media outlets, go with the big boys.

Chris:Use [unclear 38.35] right now

Wesley:but I hear you on Quality over Quantity. I actually had a conversation with a google reps at one point. They called – they want to use our service personally – not google but him on the side. He keeps telling me about the blog post and what not. He was just saying it isn’t about the numbers. There’s so many blog post everyday –it’s about quality. He didn’t care – like this company’s posting like 10 – 60 posts a day – we don’t care. We want really good ones. So I thought I was really conversing the same thing. So you know we’ve got to your victory that’s obviously the next question right? Now I got to know your failures. I heard about the best, now I got to hear about the worst.

Chris:honestly I can’t remember anything. I think my biggest failure probably was – I kind of like mention earlier the million likes. We were trying everything like we’re just talking about that the large audience doesn’t necessarily mean a lot. Because especially to your Facebook pages because Google or Facebook almost the same thing actually Facebook release a search engine wasn’t their tool but anyway. I think Facebook – no matter what we introduce to our clients, it’s so hard to get an attraction. And so we’re thinking that we were because you know there’s a million likes. OK the audience is huge. But we kept on posting and posting and trying different things and it was just not getting any sort of attraction. We actually saw our competitors actually doing pretty well. And I think our biggest failure was, in this situation they were an online boutique company. Essentially like women boutique clothing and I was approaching it like – more about like “OK how much value can I provide to the audience as a consumer. So because if I sold a lot of women boutique clothing I was thinking OK we’ll talk about like boutique, fashion trend with that type of clothing and stuff like that. And then actually I wasn’t getting any attraction. Then we learned later that the things that are actually getting attraction was just like posting buzz feed, photos or video or links to the articles that are just like vogue kind of articles. So like five secrets of man he don’t want you to know or anything or you know things like that. Or videos of husband playing with his daughters and stuff like that. And so it’s more of like heart tugging contents than like directed value of the perfect customers gets or the audience gets. So I kind of learn that in hindsight. So you know if we knew you we’re probably been posting that stuff. But it’s kind of hard, because what kind of quality of customers you’ll going to get if you just keep posting like funny video about cats and dogs and stuff like that. People see it and they like it but doesn’t necessarily mean their business going to grow from it. And I see a lot of businesses making that mistake on Facebook this days. So yeah, we weren’t able really to figure out like what are the things that would really give a fraction that show real marketing results or real revenue for the business.

Wesley:You’ve seen statistics on it and that’s why you do the test marketing with two different like liking pages. Or campaigns you do this phrase over that phrase or this word over that word. And you see it like way better fraction because you said this instead of that. Really? It’s the same ad, it’s the same product.

Chris: exactly, and I think as time goes by people are starting to increasingly treat marketing like a science rather than an art so before the internet was around and traditional advertising were huge. Like you know TV commercials, magazines, newspaper ads, things like that. You were not only to track the success of your campaign and so a lot of advertiser or advertising company just become the most clever with their advertisement. Or kind of like thought well if it’s clever you know and the company’s revenue increases then advertisement was successful. They don’t necessarily know that it was really directly to your advertising so. Now that the internet has become dominant in marketing phase I think that the increase is becoming more scientific. You are able to test different versions of your ads, different version of your websites, emails, you can split test it. And so they call it with three different versions, and so you switch one try the most fails. You can track it from the beginning – you know when you first use your ad all the way down to the actual buy from you. And that was never possible. And I’ll be able to see that

Wesley: yeah OK. Gosh we’ve covered a lot. We covered the whole gambit here so I guess we’re cut it all wrap with a couple more questions but first just this one. If you’re going to make this whole the social marketing run and you’re going to set it all up, we’ve talked about obviously you need a brain behind it. So you need to know what they’re doing in the site. You know answer those first three questions at the beginning and there’s a lot of variables to it. So what part would you give to your virtual assistant to have them do and what part would you need to do as the brain of the operation.

Chris: Yeah, so the most important thing about social media is to be thin as influencer in the space. So if you are an insurance agent, you want to be seen as like the men or women in your city that most have insurance. So you can like help the people the most make them trust you. And same goes, even without the like mom and pop shop. You want to people think that you have the best products, like the best products you can actually get you know. And they want to see that you know a lot of your business and you truly care. And whether you do that as you position yourself as a fault leader. So using marketing campaigns to position yourself as a fault leader with Virtual Assistant is actually pretty easy. So this kind of campaign we have multiple steps and I’m kind of [unclear 46:15] through this on how I actually position myself and how actually have done it myself and from my clients. So the first thing you do is you actually show. You need to put a list of the actual like the industry leaders in your particular industry that everyone feels to or whoever produces the best content out there. Now but using a virtual assistant is kind of harder to produce content like if you were right yourself. Or you’re trying to get it done for your company because the virtual assistant is not the industry leader I mean not in the industry or have any experience in the industry. The best way to approach is to be seen as a fault leader that curates the content. So if you can’t create it, you have to curate it. And a lot of influencers online will do that. Like they don’t actually produce the content but they find the best content out there and they show it to everyone. And it makes other people don’t have to go through all the news in the industry and try to find the important articles or videos or e-books and stuff like that. So and that’s typically you know for example if you want to go Barnes and nobles or something. All the people just can’t go long the most highly traffic roads and the isles. And you just to pick up sellers near tons actually for example of a curator. So you can get a virtual assistant to do this by you give them a list of the people of the best content talks them about OK, this is typically what I look for if we were to pick the best content. But then you can also have your virtual assistant used tools like this one that called buzzsumo. And Buzzsumo were actually gather the internet like for every topic that you have or add to their search and it will tell you all the most popular topics in that given date range. And it searches and sees ok how many times this article has been shared on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and things like that. And so we’re actually find the important content out there. The stuff that actually resonated already with an audience. So your virtual assistant don’t have to even read the article they can just say OK you can just take out the most popular post in this week like the ten of them. And then you can take that and say ok we have this top 10 articles for this week and our industry. And we’ll just say it like real estate so we have this list and we can turn that into our blog post where it’s like you know real estate agent or Utah real estate trends February 2017 edition. And it can just be a blog article that talks about in an overall trends. If we could list links to the top 10 articles that are going on in the space. So you can also take that and say OK we have like email subscribers. You can create like a top ten email that you can sent out weekly to your audience. Or you can have a virtual assistant that can put that together with a template of Taskbullet design. And then you can also use that at what your Virtual Assistant can post on social media. So you’re Virtual Assistant especially for professional service companies. Like they might post the best content that you can find the most popular concept you can find on social media can gain more attraction versus like the most consumer products company. So you can do that with this list of curated content. So let’s see here, so when you have also having that go on. So your virtual assistant are constantly looking for most important content posting in social media sending it out as an email. And making the content that is actually hosted on your own site. You can also have a virtual assistant use social media listening for topics that you want to be listening for. Or they can just actually be on there all day and all night depends on how many hours they have got. And they can watch and be notify when people are starting to mention certain types of topic they can barge in there. And if it’s appropriate mention your company or even a representative for your company and hop in. And kind of talk about stuff that traditionally make so you can be seen as a fault leader. Or because if you have someone on your team constantly out there trying to join conversations of people keep talking about certain topics in industry. I mean people will notice after that that especially if you’re a niche industry. Like people will recognize you. And so that helps a lot too. So then there’s a mother tools that going on in the list that your virtual assistant can automatically follow others on the social sites that you’re trying to focus on so if its on Instagram or Pinterest Facebook or Twitter. You can have them use tools that you can automatically follow people based on certain types of criteria such as how many followers they have? Where are they located? What types of topics they post about on social media? And you can have them use tools when you like them to do it in mass or you want them to do it one at a time organically. So that kind of approach is a little less risky than using a [unclear 52.26] or you know just a software that automatically follow people and comment on things and stuff like that.

Wesley:OK.

Chris:so it’s like the whole deal you know. A lot of stuff.

Wesley:that’s great. As I’m sure well the people that are listening this or will have read through it, if you’re already a taskbullet customer you’ll know that we’re using basecamp for management software. If you are interested having this system. This system that Chris just spelled out A through Z implemented with your account just let your project manager know and we will have this all done up in basecamp. We can move their project over to yours and your VA’s will understand what to do. We’ll just have to get some question answered and actually your VA can do this for you. But there’ll be more detailed instructions just how it works. On your post and also on your basecamp account and again you can ask your project manager. So if you are interested for that being set up we have that ready for you or we will this time this is posted. So that’s great Chris, this has been good. Is there anything else that I didn’t ask or anything that we did not covered that you want to mention that would be helpful?

Chris:yeah. There is a huge issue in a lot of local companies are resorting to run into an enough with the emergence of making it so easy for people to write reviews to their business. Or even fake news or you heard a fake news you know in the political industry right now with all that’s been going on.

Wesley:[unclear 54.20]

Chris:yeah, and with the world works nowadays it’s just you can publish something that is not true at all. And other people will say “oh well someone said or someone wrote about this may happening or like that or maybe potentially happening”. And somehow people read that and say “Oh it must be happening because someone wrote about someone thinking that they heard something or you know just [54:45] and you need to take that as indication that ok well if people can talk about political figures in this kind of area like they can easily talk about my company too or me even personally. So I think your personal brand or your company brand are extremely important to protect. Especially because of this [unclear 55:13] that has been happening. And so I think that one thing that business owners definitely need to do sooner or later. Especially because it takes a long time for this to pick up is monitoring and improving your reputation online. So there are tools out there like reviewenvy.com and this types of tools will let you build up your own reviews from real customers that you have. So if you have customer’s list you can add it to reviewenvy. You can send an email saying “Hey Wes, thanks for working with us. Would you recommend us to a friend?” Yes or no? If the person clicks on the Yes button it will take that person to google reviews or yelp or dax or yellowpages.com. And it will actually ask “OK please type in your review here. If it’s a good one you know. And then is someone says “No they wouldn’t recommend you to a friend” then the person just gets sent out a form saying “How can we improve” a message on your site that is not publicly posted. So that’s go straight to your team. So using a tool like that helps you generate reviews but also being able to filter all the bad ones that’s actually showing online. So it works really-really well especially because a lot of marketers haven’t got into this yet. It’s kind of like one of those springe tactics because this tools are – there so many small ones out there. No one’s actually really emerge just like the dominant review software. Which is a good way to just feel “Ok this is happening to a lot of business right now? Or a lot of business are using this strategy and I don’t think they are yet”. Like there’s a client I had a couple of months ago and there he has a minor disability. There’s a local disability social security law firm in Utah and we were sending out – they were seeing thousands of clients a month. And we would send every single client an email like this thing ”would you recommend us to your friend?”. And we were generating like 30 reviews a day. And they were all five star. You can imagine if anything came out like negative reviews information about minor disability it would be extremely difficult for that to even show up and search results. Because of this dominated – like this huge assets that you’ve created like yelp page or google page who’s dominate reviews. Like google is going to look at that and say OK like the yelp page for this company or google page is so strong with all this positive reviews, we’re not even showing negative stuff. [Unclear 58:05] especially if it’s a professional services company because your name is tied to that right? And people search other people’s name on google all the time. And I think that’s something that other people don’t understand or think about but it’s happening and definitely should be prepared for it.

Wesley:OK. Maybe we’ll just have a little interview on that set up later.

Chris:yeah that’s a lot of opportunity there

Wesley:yeah that something I need to think about but I think you’re right. All right Chris thanks, thanks for doing this interview and taking the time out of your schedule. I really-really appreciate it and hopefully the customers will gets something out of these. For everyone out there that wants to know more about Chris about what he does or what he can do. You’re welcome to try to contact him and tell me this interview and you want help his website is chriskilbourn.com. He’s an expert so hit him up and takes for everyone for listening and will catch you on the next interview. Thank you.

Chris:thanks Wes

The full CK-TB step-by-step guide we created for your social media marketing campaign is available to members on taskbullet.com.